Gurcharan Das

Author and public intellectual, Gurcharan Das is best known for a trilogy based on the classical Indian ideal of the goals of life. He studied philosophy at Harvard University and was CEO of Procter & Gamble India before he became a full-time writer. He writes a regular column for the Times of India, five Indian language papers, and contributes to international newspapers.

Thursday, July 18, 2019

On Sunday night the anchor of a TV show sneeringly and repeatedly referred to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's $5 trillion GDP target. The show was on the poor state of our cities and the well-meaning anchor didn't mean to demonise economic growth even though it came out sounding that way. When this was pointed out to her, she replied in her defence that India should grow but with responsibility to the environment. No one could disagree with that but the viewer was left unsure about the virtues of growth.

Ever since the $5 trillion goal was announced last week, it has set off a healthy debate with Modi calling his critics "professional pessimists". It is a good thing for a nation to aspire to a target. It also suggests that Modi 2.0 has a new mindset – a happy change from the "garibi hatao" mindset of giveaways that afflicted Modi 1.0 after Rahul Gandhi's jibe about a "suit-boot sarkar", which led to an unhappy race to the bottom during the recent general election. The ambitious target restores the growth mindset that got Modi elected in the first place in 2014.

The pursuit of higher GDP is easy to malign – it was invented during the industrial age and has its limitations. Many blame growth for harming the environment. They want governments to stop chasing money and start caring about the people. But it is also understandable why GDP remains the best guide for policy makers. In recent years growth has lifted more than a billion people around the world out of crushing poverty.

Only through growth does a society create jobs. Only growth provides taxes to the government to spend on education (that brings opportunity and equity) and healthcare (that improves nutrition, decreases child mortality and allows people to live longer.) In India, growth provided the means to bring subsidised gas to rural households to counter indoor air pollution from burning dung and wood for cooking. In 1990, this insidious form of pollution caused more than 8% of all deaths in the world; with growth and prosperity, this figure is down to nearly half today. Even outdoor pollution rises sharply when a poor nation begins to develop but declines as the nation prospers and has the resources to control it. It's not surprising that nations with high per capita GDP enjoy the highest ranks on the indices of human development and happiness.

It was not appropriate in her Budget speech to extoll the virtues of GDP growth, but the finance minister could have explained how achieving her bold target was crucial to creating jobs for the millions who voted for BJP. I would go further and make a new slogan for Modi 2.0, following Deng's example in China – "Not only garibi hatao, but amiri lao." This would capture the hopes and aspirations of the young. Instead of turning defensive about suit-boot, the right answer from a reformist prime minister should be, "Yes, I want every Indian to aspire to the comforts of a suit-boot lifestyle."

Success in achieving the $5 trillion target depends on implementing bold reforms and a change in other mindsets as well. Export pessimism, inherited from the 1950s, still persists and India's share in global exports remains a measly 1.7%. No country became middle class without exports. We must reverse the unfortunate protectionism that has afflicted the nation since 2014 and change our slogan to "Make in India for the World". Only through exports will come the high productivity jobs and acche din for our aspiring youth.

Second, growth and jobs will only come through private investment. Investor sentiment is weak and the biggest investors find India's environment turning hostile. The Budget has exacerbated this and it may be one reason for the stock market crash. Third, although it has become a major exporter of farm produce, India continues to treat its farmers like poor peasants. Farmers need freedom of distribution (scrap APMCs, Essential Commodities Act, etc), production (encourage contract farming), cold chains (liberalise multi-brand retail), and a stable policy on exports. Bleeding subsidies for fertilisers and PDS must be replaced by direct benefit transfers.

It is not enough to implement reforms, Modi needs to sell them. To begin with, sell them to his party, to RSS and allied saffron units. And then to the rest of the country. Margaret Thatcher used to say famously that she spent 20% of her time doing reforms and 80% selling them. The previous reformers – Narasimha Rao, Vajpayee, and Manmohan Singh – failed in this task. With his overwhelming mandate Modi should expend some of his political capital in this task. It is high time India stopped reforming by stealth.

In democracies the winner's honeymoon usually lasts a hundred days. The best answer to critics who are sceptical about the $5 trillion goal is to show tangible results during this period. For example, pull out the land and labour reform bills from the Modi 1.0 closet; improve them, and begin to "sell" these reforms in anticipation of getting them through the Rajya Sabha this time around. The FM on her part should quickly follow up on her bold disinvestment target by announcing a time bound plan for the strategic sale of other public sector companies (apart from Air India). Actions such as these will gain the peoples' trust in the ambitious $5 trillion number. And follow up with quarterly progress reports to the nation to reinforce confidence in Modi 2.0's bold vision.

Monday, June 03, 2019

With the re-election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, fears are again being expressed of creeping authoritarianism in India. But i worry about the opposite problem. I do not fear a strong state but a weak and ineffective one. A weak state has frail institutions, especially a feeble rule of law that takes a dozen years to give justice and has 3.3 crore cases pending in the courts. A weak state does not protect the weak against the strong. A weak state creates uncertainty rather than predictability in peoples' minds and allows policemen, ministers and judges to be bought. It also prevents quick action by the executive and slows reforms to a snail's pace because of warped incentives within the bureaucracy.

One lesson that Modi should have learnt in the past five years is about the limits of the Indian prime minister's power. A liberal democratic state rests on three pillars: an effective executive, the rule of law and accountability. We obsess over the third pillar when the real issue is the first. With the nation always in election mode, India's problem is not accountability, it is about the ability of the state to get things done.

The Indian prime minister is weak also because real power resides with state chief ministers, who are the real rulers of India. Ironically, it was Modi's performance as chief minister that got him elected in 2014, and we assumed that he would carry that magic when he became prime minister. It didn't happen. Although Indira Gandhi came close to becoming a dictator, she too discovered the limits of her power.

Illustration: Ajit Ninan

In 2014, Modi asked the Indian people to give him 10 years to transform India. Well, here is his chance. That transformation must begin not with economic reform but with reform of governance. Modi can take inspiration from Margaret Thatcher, who saved up the more difficult reforms – the reforms of the state – for her second term. It will not be easy to enhance state capacity because India has historically been a weak state unlike China. Our history is that of independent kingdoms while China's is a history of unitary empires. The four empires of India – Maurya, Gupta, Mughal and British – were weaker than the weakest Chinese empire.

Our first loyalty is to society – our family, our jati, our village. Although the state was mostly weak, India always had a strong society. Hence, oppression did not come from the state but from society – from the Brahmins, for example, and it needed a constant stream of renouncers and saints, like the Buddha, to protect us from oppression. Because power was dispersed historically, India could only have become a federal democracy 70 years ago and China could only have become an authoritarian state. The lesson from history is that we need a strong state to get things done and we need a strong society to make the state accountable.

China's government today is ironically more popular than India's because it has delivered outstanding performance. Not only has it wiped out poverty, making a poor country middle class, but it has relentlessly improved day to day governance. In the end, China has delivered better education, health and welfare to aam admi. The secret of its success is not authoritarianism but the fact that it has focussed on state capacity. While elections have given the Indian people more freedom (and this is a great achievement) the Chinese state has given its people a more predictable day to day life through better governance. This is not to suggest that Indians will exchange their system for the Chinese (nor should they) but if you try and put yourself in the shoes of the Indian and the Chinese aam admi, you must feel disappointed with our democracy.

China has succeeded in enhancing the capacity of its state by making its bureaucracy more motivated and effective. This means closely monitoring and rewarding the performance of officials. Promotions in the Chinese bureaucracy are not based on seniority but upon superior delivery of services to citizens. These incentives in turn motivate Chinese bureaucrats to be more pragmatic – unlike rule bound Indian officials – and they search for and re-apply the best practices that deliver on the ground.

India's bureaucracy has suffered for decades because no political leader has had the guts to implement the crying reforms that everyone has agreed upon for 50 years. An honest and transparent tax collecting machinery will collect more taxes in the end. The same thing applies to reforms in the three other parts of the state – the judiciary, the police and the Parliament – where countless reform commissions have endorsed the same blueprints for change.

Will Modi be the strong leader who has the courage to take on vested interests and enhance the capacity of the Indian state? He certainly has plenty of experience, both in Gujarat and in the Centre, and he also knows the pitfalls in taking on vested interests. The way to begin is to catch low hanging fruit. This means to first implement existing laws; then only create new laws. When it comes to policy, it is not about the 'what' but about the 'how'. Everyone knows what is to be done; the real question is, how to do it. India has plenty of laws but China has order. You need both 'law and order', as the American TV serial says.

Reforming institutions will be much tougher than economic reform but the rewards will also be greater. If he succeeds, Modi will go down in history as the one who fulfilled his promise of 'minimum government, maximum governance'. India has done well when it has bet on its people; it is about time to bet on its government.

Tuesday, April 16, 2019

India in 2014 was a troubled and discontented nation. Inflation was in the double digits, growth was declining, and corruption was rampant. Sick of the drift and paralysis in the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, many Indians longed for a leader who would get the nation out of the mess. The situation was not unlike Britain's in the late 1970s. Britain found Margaret Thatcher; India found Narendra Modi.

The sudden ascent of the tough and stocky 63-year-old as a serious contender for the nation's highest office caught everyone by surprise. As chief minister of the state of Gujarat, Modi had built a vibrant economy and reduced corruption. His campaign speeches, with their single-minded focus on vikas (development) were fresh and mesmerizing. But people were also wary. Modi was considered dictatorial and anti-Muslim. Above all, he carried the stain of Hindu-Muslim riots in 2002, when his state government looked the other way as nearly a thousand people, most of them Muslims, were killed over several days.

I, too, worried about electing a politician like Modi. Yet I also believed that the Indian government was not doing enough to capitalize on its extremely young population, about half of which is under the age of 25. If those millions of working-age women and men could be lifted from underemployment in the informal sector to well-paying jobs, the gains in overall prosperity would far outweigh the burden of supporting the old and the very young. Economists call this the "demographic dividend," which is known to spur GDP growth in developing countries. If managed well, India's economy had the potential to lift millions from poverty and send the country on a path to middle-income status. But within a dozen years, the window of opportunity would close as India's youth began to age. Among the candidates in the 2014 elections, Modi seemed to be the only one to grasp this, making him the country's best hope for reaping the demographic dividend. The alternative was Rahul Gandhi—a scion of the political dynasty that had governed the country for the better part of six decades—and he did not even come close.

I contemplated a dilemma. Should India risk its precious commitment to secularism and pluralism for the sake of prosperity, jobs, and fighting corruption? I agonized for months and then did something unusual. I decided, for the first time in my life, to vote for the right-wing, Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP)—and I did so because Modi was its leader. I was among the first Indian liberals to endorse him publicly, in my Sunday column in the Times of India and in six other Indian papers.

There was no denying that Modi was a sectarian and authoritarian figure. But I knew that India's democratic institutions were strong enough to prevail over those tendencies. Nothing would absolve Modi of his responsibility for the 2002 riots. But neither would anything lessen the moral imperative to fight widespread poverty with sound economic policy. A vote for the BJP was, in my mind, a calculated risk. Millions of Indians agreed, and Modi swept the polls.

To voters used to being treated like victims, Modi's uplifting image and rhetoric were a welcome change. The Indian National Congress of Rahul Gandhi cast its constituents as defenseless casualties of global capitalism; a slate of caste-based parties promised justice for those harmed by India's rigid social hierarchies. But Modi—the son of a chaiwallah, one of India's ubiquitous tea-sellers—embodied the promise of social mobility across the boundaries of caste and class. That his English was labored at best only burnished his credentials as a man of the people. His landslide victory credited the dignity of shopkeepers and invited India's Anglophile elite to re-examine its Brahmanical prejudices.

Modi extended the BJP's appeal to India's rapidly growing middle class, which had enjoyed the fruits of economic liberalization in the 1990s. But in so doing, he created a divided party, with an economically liberal wing and a culturally conservative wing. Many in the former did not subscribe to the BJP's cultural agenda of Hindutva, the belief that India should be a nation of and for the Hindus. Even if these voters had supported Modi's agenda of economic reform, his party's majoritarian politics left a feeling of discomfort that was hard to shake.

TAKING STOCK

Five years on, I am disillusioned. Modi has delivered only partially on his economic promises, and he has unconscionably polarized the country. With a GDP growth rate of roughly seven percent, India's is the fastest-growing major economy, but this growth has not brought the promised jobs. Nor has Modi leveraged his outright majority in the lower house of parliament (rare in Indian politics) to execute the far-reaching reforms that would have made India more competitive. He could, for example, have reformed the distribution of farm commodities and thus helped prevent the recent collapse in food prices, which has destroyed countless farmers' livelihoods. He could have used India's slow-burning banking crisis to privatize the worst-performing public-sector banks, which are going the way of Air India, the state airline that has been mismanaged into near bankruptcy. No other democracy has 70 percent of its financial assets locked in public-sector banks, where the temptation is high to issue loans based on political ties. Modi could also have focused more on exports. Instead, he has been gradualist like his predecessors, broadly operating within the old consensus of excessive public ownership and state control.

To be sure, Modi has delivered on two major promises: inflation has come down from double digits to between two and three percent. Corruption has not vanished, but it has declined, with the country moving up seven spots in Transparency International's Corruptions Perceptions Index since 2014. Several of Modi's reforms have been game-changers. Although poorly implemented, the landmark Goods and Services Tax has replaced a messy patchwork of state-level taxes, finally turning all of India into a single market. By some estimates, its introduction may increase annual GDP growth by as much as 2 percent in the long term. A new bankruptcy code will ensure that the country's assets are more productively employed, as dying companies can now be taken over by new owners. Because 300 million Indians now have bank accounts, and more than a billion have cell phones and unique biometric identity cards, mobile banking has taken off. The government can therefore gradually switch from leaky subsidies to direct cash transfers. Similarly, transactions between citizens and the state are moving online, leading India to move up over 50 spots in the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business Index since 2014. Modi has begun the job of making India function better.

Modi has broadly operated within the old consensus of excessive public ownership and state control.

Other moves were smaller but important nonetheless. India began auctioning natural resources online in a transparent manner, liberalized rules for foreign investment, deregulated energy prices, and allowed the self-attestation of legal documents (which freed citizens from running around to get their documents attested by government officials or corrupt notaries). Much-needed legislation for labour reform and land acquisition got stuck, however, because the BJP did not have a majority in the upper house.

And Modi's boldest move turned out to be a blunder. On November 8, 2016, he proclaimed that 500-rupee and 1,000-rupee notes would no longer be legal tender—a sudden announcement that rendered worthless almost 87 percent of the currency in circulation. The measure, an attempt to rein in corruption and the informal economy, touched the life of every Indian with crushing effect. For months, people stood in line outside banks to change their notes. The liquidity crisis destroyed the livelihoods of millions of people. Two years later, most economists believe that demonetization is one of the worst ways to tackle corruption and the untaxed economy. Reducing institutional opportunities for bribery and embezzlement is far more productive.

Some of the most robust government institutions have weakened: official data on jobs, for example, can no longer be trusted. Meanwhile, fears about Modi's majoritarian politics have come partially true. Although bloody riots like those in Gujarat in 2002 have not recurred, diverse India's prized social cohesion is under threat, and religious minorities feel insecure. The BJP's obsession with Hindu nationalism has legitimated bans on beef production in the populous Hindi-speaking northern states and emboldened vigilantes who attack anyone suspected of mistreating cows.

MISSED OPPORTUNITIES

At the heart of Modi's failure is the weak capacity of the Indian state. Modi relied excessively on the civil service to formulate complex reforms, rather than bringing in outside experts. Civil servants are often inclined to protect the status quo instead of executing new initiatives—especially in a country where seniority, not results, still gets people promoted.

Consider Modi's Make in India program, a push to make the country more competitive in global markets. Indian civil servants lacked the competence to oversee such an effort. Moreover, since Jawaharlal Nehru was prime minister in the 1950s, Indian civil servants have looked upon exports with skepticism. Yet if India could grow its abysmal 1.7 percent share of global trade to 2.5 percent, the jobs now leaving China could come to India, rather than to Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Indonesia.

Moreover, Modi announced too many programs at once and tried to execute them all himself. He centralized decision-making in the prime minister's office—something he had done successfully as chief minister of Gujarat. But India, with its federal structure, is not Gujarat. A chief minister may be all-powerful in a given state, but a prime minister has to learn to implement programs by motivating and cajoling regional leaders across the country. To make matters worse, Modi seems to have been continuously in an election mode for the past five years. Constant campaigning diverts the executive's attention from executing reforms that often bring short-term pain for long-term gain. To be fair, Modi was aware of this problem— he championed introducing simultaneous state elections across the country, but the idea lacked support among other parties.

Modi is ultimately not a liberal reformer. He is a pragmatic modernizer, like Singapore's Lee Kwan Yew. His stance owes in part to external constraints: to this day, capitalism has not found a comfortable home in India. Many citizens believe that market-oriented reforms make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Despite the huge benefits of increased competition since 1991, many Indians cannot distinguish between being pro-market and pro-business. India has not had a leader like China's Deng Xiaoping or the United Kingdom's Margaret Thatcher, capable of selling the competitive market to the people. As a result, every Indian government has reformed by stealth, and Modi has been no different.

THE UNHAPPY CENTER

Over the next five weeks, 900 million voters will be eligible to vote and election fever will once again seize the country. Probably because Modi has failed to create jobs, the BJP's rhetoric has turned from economics to identity politics and security issues. When a Pakistan-based terrorist group killed some 40 Indian paramilitary troops in Kashmir on February 14, the government took the unprecedented step of retaliating with an air strike inside Pakistan, purportedly against a terrorist camp. The incident, and the subsequent battle of Indian and Pakistani jet fighter planes, burnished Modi's military credentials. The whole episode fits in well with his nationalist rhetoric, which brands as unpatriotic anyone who criticizes the government, especially on its military counterterrorism operations in Kashmir.

My own dreams for Modi have faded. Had he reformed vigorously and begun to deliver the promised jobs, I would have applauded him for giving India a shot at the demographic dividend. I might even have forgiven his distasteful ethno-nationalist politics. But Modi remains the most popular leader on the Indian political scene. It seems unlikely that the Congress Party under Rahul Gandhi, with its chaotic coalition of regional allies, will unite behind a positive vision and create an effective vehicle for reform. Instead, the country is polarized between those who love Modi and those who hate him. A middle-of-the-road person such as myself finds that he has no one to vote for. Many Indians are here with me, in the unhappy center.

Friday, January 04, 2019

"Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness," wrote Vladimir Nabokov in the opening lines of his memoir, Speak Memory.

Nabokov believed that human beings are more afraid of the abyss after death and viewed the one before birth more calmly.

Whereas the fearful unknown of the dark voids drove my Hindu father to mystical religion, I was drawn to the bright side. There I found kama or "desire" in Sanskrit.

Unlike animals, human beings are not governed by instinct alone. Instinctual desire travels from our senses to our imagination, from where it creates a fantasy around a specific individual.

These fantasies become the source of intense "pleasure," and this happens to be the other meaning of kama. Ever fearful of too much devotion to erotic love, most societies are worried about this charming human inclination, and instituted monogamy via the institution of marriage.

This was done for the sake of social harmony. Fancying a neighbour's wife or husband can be an intoxicating temptation. Reaching for it can bring pain and tragedy, destroying families and peace.

Kama can be a desire for anything, but like the English word "desire," it refers generally to erotic desire.

A desire to act

Kama is also the desire to act. It drove Shakespeare to sit down one morning and write dazzling Othello, who turned out, alas, to be one of the unhappiest victims of kama.

Since my ancient Hindu ancestors realized that kama is the source of action, of creation and of procreation, they elevated it not only to a god, but also one of the goals of the human life. They thought of it as a cosmic force that animates all of life.

Kama's history is the struggle between kama optimists and pessimists. While kama optimists zero in on strategies from the Kamasutra for entering the "web of desire," as William Blake called it, kama pessimists are concerned about kama's darker, sinister side.

They dwell on how it creates, but also destroys. That it may inspire love alright, but this drive can become uncontrollable, obsessive and violent.

One can spend a lifetime to discover how to enjoy desire but not too much how to strike a civilized balance between over-indulgence and repression.

Wanting what you don't have

Plato wisely observed that desire is a lack of something that one does not possess. Lovers long to unite in order to fill this deficiency. But how can something that is missing, or perishes once attained, be a goal of life.

Kamagita, a "song of desire," embedded deep inside the Mahabharata, the ancient Indian epic, reminds us that when we control one desire, another pops up.

For example, in those who choose to give up desire for wealth and give away their money, a new craving emerges — a desire for reputation. Conversely, those who choose to renounce the world and become an ascetic are often driven by a desire for heaven or for moksha, "liberation" from the human condition.

More than 2,500 years ago in the forests of north India, some curious fellows, while conducting mental experiments, called the Upanishads were struck by the unsatisfactory nature of kama.

To them, finding an answer was very important, and it was also central to the Buddha's project. The ancient yogis sought ways to quiet this endless, futile striving, and their goal became chitta vriti nirodha, "to still the fluctuations in the mind," in the words of Patanjali.

Acting without desire

The answer of the Bhagavad Gita to this riddle of kama is to learn to act without desire. But how is this possible when, according to the earliest Upanishad, "man is desire"?

You are what your deep, driving desire is. As you desire is, so is your will As your will is, so is your deed. As your deed is, so is your destiny.

The Bhagavad Gita is aware that a person cannot stop desiring, nor does it want him to lose the will to act. It proposed the idea of "desireless action," which means to renounce the personal rewards of one's own actions – in short, act so that you don't care who gets the credit.

I have read this refrain dozens of times, but I remain sceptical that a person can give up his fundamental, egoistic desire and still remain human.

A lurking pessimism

In India, we tend to blame the Victorians for the prudishness of the Indian middle class. But we must acknowledge that, lurking deep in the Indian psyche, is deep pessimism about kama's prospects.

This is what led the great ascetic god, Shiva, to burn the god of love in frustration when the latter disturbed his thousand-year meditation. Hence, desire exists ananga, "bodiless," in the human mind.

During my Christian missionary school education here in India, I was taught to equate desire with "original sin." But the ganja smoking priest from our neighbourhood temple told me stories of playful, mischievous gods, who created the world for the fun of it.

And one of them, Krishna, danced with 40,000 women for an entire Brahma night that lasted 4.5 billion human years. From him I learned that our civilization is the only one that elevated kama to an aim of life and left behind a legacy of erotic Sanskrit love poetry, the Kamasutra and the erotic sculptures at Khajuraho.

Even the devotional love of god took a romantic turn in Gitagovinda, where Radha, a married woman, longs to unite with her divine, adulterous lover.

I am at an age when I mostly relive memories, some intimate, others wistful, and still others so distressing that I am left in a sweat.
Desiring to desire

Much like the next person, I desire to desire. The human rhythm is that we live for a while and then we die. It matters to us in ways that it does not to other creatures.

What is this mattering? We want our lives to have meaning. Well, kama too is a gesture in the direction of a meaningful life.

If nothing else, it is a compensatory move. After all, we are constantly reminded about dharma, "our duty to others." Repressed as we are, the thought escapes us that kama is also a duty—a "duty to ourselves."

Ultimately, kama is needed to realize our capacity for living a flourishing life.

Sunday, December 30, 2018

Another series of elections has come and gone. Like an imminent surgery, an election has a way of crowding out all thoughts from the mind and turning the focus of politicians to populism and free giveaways, forgetting the difficult job of economic and governance reform. The results of the latest state elections have reminded us that Indians are by nature sceptical and not shy to change their leaders. The grand certainties of 2014 have suddenly become the grand doubts of 2019.

From earliest times, the Indian temper has been comfortable with uncertainty, beginning with ambiguity over how the cosmos was born in the famous Nasadiya verse in the Rig Veda and the doubting neti, neti (‘not this, not that’) method of Advaita. I believe our questioning nature is a strength in building citizenship and democracy. Unfortunately, our educational system, instead of nourishing inquiry, does everything possible to kill it through a rote learning system. The ascendance of technology, engineering and ‘useful subjects’ has displaced the old-style liberal education that promoted inquisitiveness. A few excellent private liberal arts and sciences institutions are coming up, and they offer some hope for the future. Most of the older ones have faded into mediocrity.

In these times when ‘liberal’ has acquired a bad odour, it is worth reminding ourselves that it shares a root with ‘liberty’. Liberal education is a method of learning rather than mastery of specific content, teaching one to reason and providing the confidence to judge for oneself. A liberal education befits a free human being, one who is capable of governing himself and participating in collective self-government. This ability translates at election time in distinguishing a charlatan from a sensible and sincere candidate. In the recent elections, it would have exposed the disastrous idea of farm loan waivers which rewards defaulters and punishes honest farmers, aside from bankrupting the states’ treasuries, leaving no money for real agricultural reform.

If a liberal education is not only about book learning but an approach to learning, any subject – even manual labour – could be part of the curriculum, and help shrink some of our caste prejudice against working with our hands. When we study something for its own sake, it reinforces our early curiosity as children and builds upon our civilisation’s ancient sceptical temper. Indeed, an interrogation of the Upanishads and the epics with a modern mind can be as valuable as reading Homer, Shakespeare and Marx.

A liberal education can also help to raise the tone of our political discourse that has plunged to great depths in recent years. All parties were responsible for the shameful lack of civility in the recent elections. Rahul Gandhi contributed to it with his persistent ‘chowkidar chor hai’ with regard to the Rafale fighter deal. He did not censure his functionaries who made obnoxious remarks about Modi’s mother’s age or cast aspersions on his father. It is to Rahul’s credit that he apologised for a former minister’s insulting reference to Modi’s occupational caste. Earlier references to ‘maut ka saudagar’ by Sonia Gandhi were equally ‘uncivil’.

BJP is no better. Modi has been guilty of uncivil language about the dynasty. A Gujarat minister falsely accused the late Verghese Kurien of diverting funds from Amul to Christian missionaries. Modi did not repudiate this aspersion on a bureaucrat who has made India the world’s largest milk producer. All parties, especially AAP and Shiv Sena repeatedly abuse opponents – for example, “son of Khilji” is a sickening reference to Rahul’s foreign origins.

A liberal education is beneficial in cultivating the habit of respectful engagement in a community, dedicated to finding workable answers rather than resorting to insulting innuendos about the ethnic identity of opponents. It also leads generally to a centrist position in politics, eschewing the extreme right and left. The political centre is accommodative, tends to harmonise social and cultural contradictions and appeals to the average voter, especially the minorities. Hence, most elections in India since Independence have been won by moderate candidates. Even the Modi wave in 2014 was the result of Modi adopting a centrist promise of vikas and jobs, which attracted the aspirational, young voter. It is quite another matter that the promise has not been fulfilled and Modi is a worried man today.

Finally, approaching education in a liberal manner can also make us better human beings. By freeing us from the demands of getting a job and making a living, it offers the freedom to reflect upon existential questions of who we are and why we are here. It turns our attention away from ourselves to our place in the world, making us see that we are part of something larger than ourselves. This ‘self-forgetting’ is always good for building character. When combined with action and experience, it leads to prudence (phronesis) as Aristotle suggested – to do the right thing to the right person, at the right time, in the right manner, and for the right reason.

But how can a poor or middle class Indian family afford the luxury of not preparing its children for a job? Surely, a four-year undergraduate American liberal education is a luxury that most Indians cannot afford. Indeed it can, if you view liberal education not as content but as an approach to learning; it should begin in primary school and go right through postgraduate education. Liberal education is not an end but a means to prepare a young person to become a thoughtful member of society. It does not exist in isolation from making a living or becoming a good citizen. It merely reminds us that there is more to life than consumption and production.

About Me

Gurcharan Das is an author and thought leader best known for a much-acclaimed trilogy based on the classical Indian goals of the ideal life. India Unbound was on artha, 'material well-being'—the Guardian called it 'a quiet earthquake' – it is available in 19 languages and filmed by the BBC. The second, The Difficulty of Being Good, on dharma or 'moral well-being', is a contemporary meditation on the epic, Mahabharata. Kama: The Riddle of Desire is on the third goal, examining how to cherish desire in order to live a rich, flourishing life.
He studied philosophy at Harvard University and was CEO of Procter & Gamble India before he took early retirement at 50 to become a full-time writer. He writes a regular column for the Times of India and five Indian language papers, and contributes to many international papers. His other books include India Grows at Night: A liberal case for a strong state, which was on the FT's best books for 2013; a novel, A Fine Family; a book of essays, The Elephant Paradigm, and an anthology, Three Plays. He is editing for Penguin a 15 volume history series, The Story of Indian Business. He lives in Delhi.